Teaching Narrative Writing with Frankenstories

Developing story elements

Players can introduce four basic types of story element:

  • Characters
  • Places
  • Objects
  • Events

Effective stories usually spend time developing elements as they are introduced—adding detail to make them more interesting and believable and provide a frame of reference that will help the audience make sense of later events.

You don't necessarily need a lot of detail to establish believability and interest.

For example, The Fisherman and His Wife, like many fairytales, introduces story elements and develops them with the lightest of sketches:

Once upon a time there were a fisherman and his wife who lived together in a shack that was so filthy it might as well have been a pisspot. Every day the fisherman went out to fish, and he fished and he fished. One day he sat there looking down into the clear water, and he sat, and he sat, and his line went all the way down to the bottom of the sea. And when he pulled it out, there was a great big flounder on the hook.

The Fisherman and His Wife(2012)

This snippet introduces five story elements but only develops four of them:

  • the shack's physical qualities: filthy as a pisspot
  • the fisherman's daily routine: every day he fished and fished
  • the sea's physical qualities: clear
  • the flounder's physical qualities: great big

Compare this to the type of detailed description we might find when introducing a character or other element in a contemporary novel:

My dad looked like crap.

His blond hair was flat and grubby and his skin seemed too big for his bones. The muscly, tanned guy who’d built me a two-storey treehouse when I was a kid had been replaced by a pale shell of a man who didn’t build anything.

Catching Teller Crow(2018)

This snippet demonstrates a more elaborated development that includes physical features, narrator judgments, memories, metaphor, and character behaviour.

Each approach is fit for its own context!

Again, the purpose of developing story elements is to make them believable and interesting enough for our story to 'work'—meaning have the effect we want.

Players can introduce four basic types of story element:

  • Characters
  • Places
  • Objects
  • Events

Each of these elements can be developed through multiple aspects, including:

  • Concrete physical details, including sensory description
  • Routines and behaviour, including dialogue
  • History
  • Thoughts and feelings
  • Beliefs and judgments
  • Relationships
  • Meaning and value

You can explore these ideas in more detail in Writelike's narrative lessons, including:

You can pair the term 'develop' with 'describe'. 

In drama, actors don't 'describe'; they perform, so the word 'develop' makes more sense. In writing, 'describe' is more conventional.

However, 'describe' tends to sound a little static and fixed, whereas 'develop' is somewhat more active and expansive, so we've decided to lean towards that term.

Here's a Frankenstory that introduces key elements quickly and effectively, using minimal detail:

It wasn’t fair, she knew. He had always been a good robot to her. But she needed the metal desperately or the entire colony was at risk. It wouldn’t hurt him at all, but she would miss his sense of humour.

"Friends"

This snippet gives us a good robot with a sense of humour who is made of much-needed metal, while a colony is in crisis and a narrator has to make a difficult choice about an unspecified process. 

Other Frankenstories develop elements in more detail:

Ephena tipped the contents of her cup into the burning brazier. The contents vanished in a flash of green flame. Her tongue and lips still stung from the poison, and she felt an itching across the pale skin of her neck. Her mind raced as she glanced at the faces of her guests.

"Sweet Schemes Are Made of These"

This snippet introduces a character and a cup, and implies that the character has been poisoned by developing her reaction, including physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

(This is an example of developing an event or process.)

And some Frankenstories spend so much time developing their subject that they never get to telling a story, instead functioning more as portraits:

God I hate Chloe. I can't believe her. She's got all the men in town wrapped around her little finger. All of them, from the rich merchants in Ketzerplatz to the poor men sleeping in the mud under the bridge. And the women: they're all afraid of her. She knows it, too.

"Where Did She Get All Those Followers?"

This snippet develops Chloe as well as the narrator's attitude towards her.

The entire game is spent developing this relationship: nothing 'happens' and the relationship never changes (the story ends when, in the final line, the narrator admits they are jealous).

Here is a game format you can use to help students develop their description and development skills.

Framing for students

  • Tell students they are going to be creating a portrait rather than a story. 
  • The goal is to come up with as many interesting details as possible.

Game setup

  • Use a standard 3-5-round game with any prompt.

Gameplay

  • Each round, players must introduce one element suggested by the prompt.
  • They must use a 'being' verb to introduce the element: is, was, were, etc.
  • They must spend the round developing that element in whatever way they like.
  • They must introduce a new element each round.
  • They can use the last line of the final round to 'make something happen'.
  • Example game: Details about the accident

Tips

  • Using passive being-verb introductions will channel players toward more descriptive writing.
  • Encourage players to add as much detail as they can.
  • Players can get confused about developing events and situations vs advancing the story and 'making things happen'. See the dedicated note on this page for more on this, but the rule of thumb is if you are developing the situation it shouldn't change in any meaningful way. You can describe a fire, but you can't put the fire out.
  • Refer to the "Aspects for development" list further down this page for description ideas.

Variation 1: Go deeper and deeper on one element

  • Players introduce one element in Round 1 and then have to introduce a new sub-element every round.
  • For example, if the first element is a chair, every subsequent round has to be about some smaller element of the chair (e.g. the fabric, the legs, the history—players can't introduce a bus or a robot or a character, unless it's part of developing the chair).  
  • This version forces players to dig deep!
  • Example game: About this frog guy

Variation 2: Specify an aspect to develop each round

  • If you want to push students to explore new ways of describing, you can tell them which aspect of an element to focus on.
  • For example, character, setting, events, physical detail, thoughts and feelings, habits and routine behaviour, history, meaning, and so on.

Details about the accident

  • One element per round.
  • Each element is introduced with a being verb.

About this frog guy

  • First round chooses a focus element.
  • Each subsequent round finds a sub-element to develop further.

We use the term 'developing' because we want to contrast it with term 'advancing':

"We are developing elements vs advancing the story."

However, when you start teaching 'developing' as a distinct story skill, you quickly run into confusion around how it applies to actions and events. Players will argue in games if certain rounds are really developing elements or if they are telling a story.

Situation vs story

The easiest way to think about this is in terms of developing a situation. 

There can be a lot going on in a situation:

  • If a building is on fire there could be tenants climbing out windows, firefighters operating hoses, helicopters filming overhead, bystanders observing, and so on.

In listing these individual elements, we are developing the situation with the fire. 

We could also focus on any one of these elements and develop it further: the firefighters in their soot-smeared tunics, reflector strips aglow in the firelight, etc etc.

But while we are describing and developing the fire, nothing important changes:

  • If we start a fire and keep it going by adding more and more detail, we are developing.
  • But if a gas tank explodes and injures the firefighters, or if it suddenly rains and puts the fire out, or the military arrive to help, then we are no longer developing story elements, but introducing and combining new elements in order to advance the story.

Time and tense

You can also discuss this in terms of time and tense: if any a story has a 'present moment', then 'developing' means describing events that occurred in the past, are routine or ongoing in the present, or would or might occur in the future.

If your students know anything about tenses and modality, this is a great way to connect those ideas.

Usually new players under-develop their elements, but once they get the hang of it they can swing in the other direction and over-develop everything, so that the story never advances.

There is no rule about this. Portraits can be as rewarding as stories.

But you want to remind players that descriptive detail is a means to an end, and part of the art of writing is deciding how much detail is enough.

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